Papillian

Origin

Nu'uman spliced with butterfly, "Bred as living decor within the Alverian holds. Through their remarkable beauty, they brought life to the terrible castles of Ancient Alveria." They were furniture that sang. They watched what happened in those castles, and the watching did not leave them.

When Alveria fell "they fled immediately and formed tiny hidden communities in deep forest, using their magic to create barriers from the outside world." The generations since have carried the castles with them. "Maddened. Since the horrors their ancestors witnessed, many created division between their minds, to assist with the compartmentalising of the terrors they saw, and the imagination that kept them alive. This has translated down through the generations in a form of madness, being of both chaotic good, and chaotic evil; whichever side is leaned into, takes over." A Papillian has two settled selves and one of them is winning.

They were made to be beautiful in a place that had no use for beauty, and they survived the end of that place by learning to hide, to remember everything, and to share one skull between two selves. Everyone who meets one wants to consult it. Everyone who meets one has heard what its dust is worth.

Body

A grown Papillian stands five to six inches and weighs less than a copper coin. A child can close a hand over one, and children do. "Their sharp furry bodies are nocturnally luminescent, emanating from their translucent skin, and thin iridescent wings. Butterfly-like wings, with a rounded curvature." The glow comes from under the skin and cannot be put out by will. The first thing anyone notices at night is the light. The second is the voice, which does not match the size: "Their voices are haughty and scratchy, while sophisticated."

There is no bone in a Papillian. The body is a pressure vessel: a jointed cuticle thin enough to read print through, held rigid by the fluid inside it, so that a Papillian who is punctured does not bleed so much as deflate, and goes soft in the legs first. The fluid itself is clear with a faint gold in it and does not clot at speed; a wound the width of a pin will empty one in the time it takes to cross a room. This is why the groves treat a thorn scratch as other peoples treat a spear wound, and why a Papillian sleeping outside the nest is always sleeping inside something.

There are no lungs. Air enters through a line of shuttered holes down each flank and goes to the tissues directly, which means a Papillian cannot raise its voice from the chest and must make every sound in the throat and mouth-parts. The famous haughtiness of the voice is partly that: a body with no bellows behind it, pitching its words to carry. It also means a Papillian can be killed by dust and smoke that would only make a Nu'uman cough, and a grove will abandon a season's nesting ground if a charcoal burner sets up within a valley of it.

The glow is a layer of luminous fat lying under the cuticle, and it burns sugar. A Papillian that has not eaten dims within an hour, and the grove reads hunger off one another the way other peoples read a face. A Papillian cannot put the light out and cannot lie about being tired. The whole of Papillian courtesy, the offered drop of nectar, the standing bowl of sap at a nest door, the insult of letting a guest dim, comes from that one fact.

The wings carry the dust, and the dust is the wealth. Each wing bears millions of loose scales, shed and replaced from a gland at the wing root, and the gland draws on the same tissue as the nerve. That is the reason the dust heals and the reason a pool of it can hold a hundred minds in one dream: what is being sold in the jars of Papillon Powder is ground nerve, harvested off a people who never stop making it. A Papillian cannot heal itself with its own dust. The gland that would do it sits behind the wing and pours outward only. They heal others and bleed out from pinpricks, and they have four thousand years of opinions about that.

The nervous system is not gathered in the head. It runs the length of the body as a chain of knots, two of which are large, and the two large ones are the seat of the two selves. A healer of another people who opened a Papillian looking for a brain would find a bead of tissue no bigger than a seed behind the eyes and nothing else that looked like thinking, and would conclude the creature could not think at all. The division the makers' record calls madness has a place in the body, and it is not a wound. It is a second knot, already there in the egg, which the horrors of the castles taught the line to use.

Memory is the other half of it. A Papillian lacks the tissue that lets other peoples let go. Nothing is pruned. "Eternal memory retention; will never forget." Every grudge, every kindness and every hour of the Alverian holds is present tense to a Papillian who chooses to look at it, which is a capability in counsel and a disease in private.

The exoskeleton adapts to any climate. In cold country the fur thickens and the plates close up; in heat they thin and pale; in wet country they take on a waxen sheen. The wings do not adapt. A Papillian cannot go into water with its wings open. It can swim with them sealed flat to the back, but a wetted wing grounds it for a day. They make no heat of their own. At dawn in cold country a grove is torpid and will not move for anything, which is why raids on groves come at first light and why the pool-wardens keep the nests warm with rotting leaf-mould banked under the hanging places. They live fifty to sixty years, the Papill forty to fifty, the Papilk twenty.

Their sight is built of thousands of facets and is very poor at detail and superb at movement. A Papillian at five paces cannot read your expression and can count the beats of your pulse in your throat. It also sees a colour that has no name in any other tongue, lying beyond violet, which the groves call the hidden colour and which lies on flowers, on fresh water, on clean skin and on the wings of their own kind in patterns that no harvester has ever seen. Every grove is signed in it. The boundary marks of the Papillon Groves, the safe paths, the warnings and the names of the dead are painted in a pigment that is invisible to everyone who wants to steal from them, and a Torkan warband can stand in the middle of a grove's archive and see leaves.

Smell and taste are one sense and it is in the feet and the antennae. A Papillian tastes a table by standing on it and knows what was eaten there a week ago. Hearing is a matter of fine hairs reading the pressure of the air, so a whisper arrives as a wind and a shout as weather; they hear the direction of a thing far better than the words of it, and in Pappush the pitch carries more meaning than the consonants. The consequence is written into their settlements: a Papillian grove has no writing anyone else can find, no lamps, no painted signs, no doors, and no straight lines. It is a country built for a creature that navigates by motion, scent underfoot and a colour nobody else has.

Life

A Papillian begins as an egg. The mother sets a clutch of eight to twelve eggs on the underside of a grove leaf above still water, and the nest hums to them. The clutch is the sett, and a nest counts its history in setts. What hatches is a crawling thing the size of a grain, blind, furred, fed nectar from the mouths of the nest through what the groves call the crawling year. The crawler is a grivvel. A grivvel cannot glow, cannot fly, cannot be carried far and cannot be hidden quickly, and a nest with a grivvel in it does not travel, which is the single greatest constraint on a hunted people and the reason groves move in the months between clutches or do not move at all.

At the end of the crawling year the child spins itself into a chrysalis and is hung in the family nest for forty days. This is the hanging season, the hanning, and through it the nest does not leave the grove and the pool-wardens hold a dream around the hanging ones so that nothing reaches them in the dark. Inside the case the grivvel comes apart. Almost everything it was is dissolved and rebuilt, and the only things carried across whole are the nerve knots, which is why a Papillian remembers its crawling year in full and remembers it from the floor.

What comes out of the chrysalis is fully formed, already glowing, and already two. The emergence is the wake. The nest watches the newly emerged for a night to see which self wakes first, and that self is given the first name. The other is named later, in the pool, at the rite the groves call the second. A Papillian is grown at the wake and has no childhood after it; the crawling year was the childhood, and it was spent on the ground being fed by mouth, which is why the groves are so gentle with the ground-bound and so merciless about the hidden colour.

The long middle is fifty years of remembering. Then the dim. Old age takes the light first: the luminous fat thins, the glow goes to a coal and then to nothing, and a Papillian who has stopped shining is near the end. Sight and scent hold to the last; a dimmed elder is still consulted and is carried to the pool by hand. The body dries to a husk within a day of death, and the nests keep the husks in the rims of the pools, which is why harvesters take Papillian alive.

They drink nectar from the trees. They take sap, fruit-water and, where a Pramata homestead is near, honey, for which they pay in dreams. They cannot eat solid food at all; the mouth-parts are a coiled straw and a set of clicking palps, and a Papillian offered bread at a Nu'uman table is being insulted whether or not the host knows it.

Frailty

A wetted wing grounds a Papillian for a day, and a wing wetted twice in a season mats the scales permanently. The matted wing is the common ruin of the people. It does not kill; it ends flight, ends the dust, and turns a counsellor into a passenger, and the groves keep the grounded and carry them and never quite stop counting them. Oshet the Grounded walked eleven years because of it.

Worse is dust-fail, when the wing-root gland thins and dries in a line that had no business drying. The world knows the dried gland as a mark of the Papill. A Papilio nest that sees it appear in one of its own watches that one for the rest of its life, because the drying and the turning have come together too often in the records for the groves to call it chance. A Papillian whose dust has failed can still counsel, still dream and still be loved, and will never again be brought a sick child.

The particular horror is the Two Awake. Both knots take the body at once, and what results is not a madness of raving; it is a stillness. The body stops, both selves pulling, and does not eat. It can last days. A grove puts the Two Awake into the pool at once, since the shared dream can hold one self down long enough for the other to move the legs, and about half come back. The rest are held in the Long Sleep until they die in it, fed by the nest, which the groves count a mercy and the Papill call the real reason the pools exist.

Perfect memory is a sickness of its own in a long-lived people. Grief does not fade in a Papillian; it waits, whole, at the same strength as the day it was made. The groves treat this with the Dark Pool, where the whole grove dreams the world before the fall together and comes up with the memory a little worn, and the wearing is the point. A Papillian kept from the pool for years is a Papillian being slowly crushed by its own recall, and the Papill, who left the pools, are what that produces when it is allowed to finish.

The small deaths: cold torpor, which is an execution if anyone finds them in it; smoke and lime dust, which kill through the flank shutters; a fur mite that comes off certain barks and blinds the antennae; and starvation, which dims the glow within an hour, empties the wing-glands within a week, and kills without ever touching the memory, so that a Papillian starves fully aware and fully articulate. The groves have a word for the last thing a starving Papillian does, which is to give its remaining dust away.

Country

The Surface Realm, deep forest. The Papillon Groves are "Secluded treasure troves in which artefacts are hidden amidst Papillian families and their nests. 100 to 300 per Papillian." Some live openly among the Nu'uman. Most do not, "as their magical properties are highly sought after and killed for."

Within their groves they keep enchanted pools made with their dream dust, in which all who enter share one lucid dream that the Papillian control. The named groves are four. The Hung Grove is the oldest of them and the seat of the pool-wardens. Vellowreach has moved four times in a century. Sipperling Wood trades openly at a river market. The Lantern Hollow is said to be empty since a Torkan warband found it, and is said by the Papillian to be very much occupied.

A grove is not a clearing. It is a hundred to three hundred hanging nests spread through the canopy of a stand of old trees, sited over still water because the eggs need the water under them and the pool needs the water in it, and sited under closed canopy because an open sky over a glowing people is an advertisement. Nothing is built on the ground. What a traveller walks through is forest.

The grove feeds on the forest and the forest feeds on the grove. A Papillian drinks nectar all day and carries the pollen of the magical flora from stand to stand on its fur, and a wood that has held a grove for a century grows flowers that grow nowhere else, thickly, in the hidden colour. Apothecaries who cannot find a Papillian look for the flowers instead, and this is how three groves have been lost. When a grove leaves, the rare flora fails inside ten years, the wood thins to ordinary timber, and the villages at the edge of it find their remedies stop working and blame each other. More than one Nu'uman feud in the deep forest is the aftermath of a grove moving in the night.

They are eaten. The night-hunting birds of the deep forest take them on the wing and the groves lose young at every emergence to them, which is the reason the wake is held under closed leaf and the reason the whole nest glows at once when one is taken, since a hundred lights confuse a hunting bird and a single light is a meal. They are hunted by everything with a price list. And they are farmed, in the worst places: a handful of noble houses keep what they call a lantern room, which is a caged grove, and the groves know the names of all of them.

Society

Nest-based, family-based, secretive by necessity. They are an oracular people, consulted rather than governed: "Many seek their guidance and knowledge." "Intelligent and quick to learn any amount and complexity of information." They can "conjoin together to form a large beautiful mass," pooling their bodies into one greater shape when the grove must move something, or frighten something, or be seen as something it is not. The conjoining is a physical trick of a boneless people: several hundred pressure vessels gripping one another's legs make a single body with real strength, and the shape they most often take is something with a face on it, because they learned in the castles that a face is what stops a hand.

The pool is the whole of their law. Council is held in the dream, where no Papillian can lie to another, since every mind in the pool sees every other. Judgement is passed there too. A Papillian who has harmed the grove is sentenced to the Long Sleep, held under in the shared dream for a season or a decade while the body is fed by the nest. Nobody wakes early from a Papillian pool. Outsiders who are invited in come out changed and grateful and unable to say quite why.

Because the glow reports hunger and the pool forbids concealment, a Papillian has almost no private life and has built a very exact etiquette to compensate. What a Papillian may withhold is listed: the second name, the location of a nest that is not its own, the contents of another's dream, and the hidden-colour marks of a grove it has only visited. Everything else is grove property. Theft among them is therefore not the taking of a thing; it is the speaking of a withheld item, and the punishment is the Long Sleep.

Each dawn a nest asks each of its own the Waking Question: which of you is awake. The answer is given and not judged. They wear nothing but their dust, though the Sipperling traders have taken to thread jewellery cut from their own fallen scales. Music is a hum carried through the whole grove at once, pitched in the range their hairs read best, which is above the hearing of the heavy peoples, so that a grove can sing all night beside a logging camp and the camp hears the wind. An oath is sworn with a hand in the pool. Two taboos hold above all: to sell the dust of a living kin, and to wake a dreamer by force.

Their one great craft is counsel, and it is priced in a manner that confounds other peoples. A Papillian does not charge coin, which it cannot carry, and does not charge food, which it can get. It charges a memory: the asker must tell it something true that it did not know, and the grove keeps that, forever, exactly. Noble houses that have consulted a grove for three generations have handed over their whole history without noticing, and the Hung Grove is, by a wide margin, the best-informed body of opinion on the Surface Realm.

Faith

The Papillian worship the wood and the good half of Irus. The wood is the grove itself, which they call the Standing Dream: every tree a sleeper, every leaf a thought of it, the pool the place where the grove's dreaming and their own run together. The shepherd face of Irus they name Irusha, the Gentle Face, who walks the wild counting what lives in it and lets the counted live. The hunter face they call only the Other, and will not name it, as they will not name their own other half aloud outside the pool. The Papill have chosen differently. They keep the Other and have forgotten the Gentle Face.

Clergy are the pool-wardens, the eldest Papilio of a grove, who hold the dream steady while the others are in it. The great rite is the Dark Pool, held on the night both moons are gone: the whole grove goes under together and dreams the grove as it was before the fall, and comes up at dawn with the memory a little worn. They believe their dead pass into the Standing Dream and can be met in the pool, and they do meet them, often. What they meet is their own perfect memory of the dead, which a Papillian cannot tell from a visit. The soul itself has gone where all souls go, to the auction of the star gods, and no Papillian has ever come back from it to say so.

Tongue

Common Tongue. Among themselves they speak Pappush, a hummed tongue with clicks of the mouth-parts for consonants, pitched high enough that most peoples hear only a whine. Two Papillian conversing in Pappush at a market sound like a hinge.

Names are short and bright, one or two syllables, given by the nest on the night of emergence to the self that woke first. The other self receives a second name in the pool, which is never spoken outside it, and a Papillian who tells you its second name has told you which half is winning. The names run: Tish, Sivvet, Pellio, Anrisk, Dovi, Ilmet, Kessa, Oshet.

Regard

"Deemed peaceful by many cultures; some see them as pests, far too bright for misery." "Highly valuable, magical imbued raw materials within them." The pest line is put more sharply in the run-down towns that use it: "the odd occasional run down town/city deem them as pests, far too bright for their misery." A Papillian is welcome in a noble house until the night the house needs money.

The Librar are friends: "The Papillians love [the Librar] as they share with them knowledge and value the knowledge they have to offer; if a Papillian nest is near a Librar, you must tread lightly." The Bogish are allies and buy dream dust for their own pools, where they use it to look forward in time. Their enemies are everyone with a knife and a price list. They are hunted for powder, wings and brains.

Harvest

Papillon Powder: "A Papillian harvested of all its healing dust, and used as a healing topical powder; nobles apply this to their face in an attempt to reverse the ageing process." The trade rests on a fact the trade does not print: the wing-root gland draws on nerve tissue, so a jar of powder is the drained nervous system of a creature that was still speaking when the draining began, and the draining must be done living, because a dead Papillian dries to a husk in a day and the glands go with it.

Papillian Wing Jewellery, cut from wings that have been matted or stripped, and worth more when the iridescence survives. Papi Mush: "The Brains of several Papillians, mushed into an intelligence paste; used to help an individual with learning." Several, because the knot behind the eyes is the size of a seed and the rest of the thinking runs down the body, so a jar of Papi Mush is a dozen spines and not a dozen heads. Papilk Poison: "Extracted from the disease riddled dust glands of a Crimson Papilk, this randomised poison can bring all assortments of diseases."

The powder is legal in every market that has ever been asked. The groves count each jar as a murder and keep the count, and the count is exact, and it is very long.

Remembered

Tish of the Hung Grove, pool-warden, who held four hundred sleepers in one dream for a whole season while a warband camped on the grove and left believing it empty.

Anrisk Second-Named, a Papill who spoke her pool name aloud in a Nu'uman court and sold the court's secrets to its enemies for the pleasure of it.

Oshet the Grounded, wings lost to a river, who walked from Vellowreach to Sipperling Wood in eleven years and is consulted on the way there still.

Kin each has a page of its own

The exoskeleton adapts to any climate, so the climate a strain settled in labels it and does not remake it. What divides the kin is the mind, and in the Papilk the Crimson.